Northwestern Innovation Institute

Bridge: Uniting Academic Innovation Leaders

Connecting leading universities to accelerate research impact through comprehensive data, AI insights, and collaborative innovation partnerships.

Bridge is dedicated to amplifying the societal impact of academic research and accelerating innovation and commercialization. This collaborative initiative brings together leading academic research institutions to unlock new opportunities for discovery and impact, driving evidence-based approaches to innovation, commercialization, research dissemination, and policymaking. Participation in Bridge is offered at no cost, ensuring that every institution can benefit from its tools and insights without financial barriers.

Bridge aggregates and integrates data on funding, publications, patents, clinical trials, newsfeeds, policy documents, licensing, and startups, as well as linkages between them. By pooling extensive institutional records from Bridge partner universities with additional data from public and proprietary sources, Bridge enables advanced analytics and AI-driven insights. This approach is grounded in our researchers’ body of pioneering research on innovation and scientific advancement and reflects our longstanding thought leadership in this domain.

Cutting-edge tools

Each partner institution receives a personalized dashboard based on its own data, designed to help sharpen strategic decisions, guide funding priorities, and assess existing technology transfer policies. The dashboard includes three proprietary tools:
‍

1. People finder

Locates individual faculty within the institution who have untapped commercialization potential.

Partner with the NI Institute

2. Idea finder:

Pinpoints particular research among the university’s papers and grants with high commercialization potential.

Engage Our Expertise

3. Partner finder

Identifies specific firms that draw upon the university’s research streams and can be potential partners in supporting research or commercializing it.

Engage Our Expertise

Benefits for partner institutions

These tools empower partner institutions to:

Unlock talent & ideas

Discover overlooked or "hidden" researchers and ideas with commercial potential within the institution

Partner with the NI Institute

Forecast success

Predict the success of emerging ideas, proposals, and intellectual property disclosures

Engage Our Expertise

Build strategic partnerships

Find and evaluate potential collaborators and strategic partners

Partner with the NI Institute

Identify innovation gaps

Detect areas with unmet innovation potential

Engage Our Expertise

Insights gained through Bridge feed directly into the NI Institute’s ongoing research, deepening our understanding of technology advancement and commercialization, strengthening our understanding of research impact, and fueling the development of more tools to improve research outputs, identify people and ideas with untapped potential, and predict commercialization outcomes.

Directors

Dashun Wang

Founder and Director, NI Institute

Linkedin profile

Kellogg profile

Alicia Loffler

Executive Director, NI Institute

Linkedin profile

Kellogg profile

Ben Jones

Gordon and Llura Gund Family Professor of Entrepreneurship, Professor of Strategy

Kellogg profile

From Discovery to Impact:
The Science Behind Accelerating Global Innovation

Bridge is guided by a Founder's Committee of five distinguished institutional leaders

This group provides strategic oversight to ensure robust governance and effective management of the data submitted by partner institutions. It also offers expert guidance to the research team, informing both their data analysis and interpretation of results. The Committee’s feedback on potential knowledge gaps and unexplored innovation opportunities helps refine research priorities and uncover new areas of discovery. The Founder’s Committee also plays a vital role in disseminating research findings and developing partnership strategies, driving greater innovation and research impact.

Orin Herskowitz

President, Mussallem CHD Alliance

Linkedin profile

Samir Mayekar

Associate Vice President and Managing Director, Polsky Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation at the University of Chicago

Linkedin profile

Kirsten Leute

Partner, University Relations at Osage University Partners, a venture capital fund focused on university innovation that collaborates with university technology transfer offices to provide capital and support for technology- and science-based startups.

Linkedin profile

Ian D. McClure

Vice President, Innovation at UK HealthCare; Associate Vice President, Research, Innovation, and Economic Impact at UK Innovate; and Executive Director, UK Innovate at the University of Kentucky (UK)

Linkedin profile

Lisa Dhar

Associate Vice President for Innovation and New Ventures, Northwestern University

Linkedin profile

The Bridge Innovation Network
‍

Connect with the Future of Science Innovation

Whether you're a research institution looking to join Bridge, a potential partner interested in accelerating scientific innovation, or a journalist covering breakthroughs in how we understand discovery itself, we invite you to explore collaboration with the NI Institute. Our team is dedicated to transforming how the world approaches scientific progress.

Thank you! Your submission has been received!

Oops! Something went wrong while submitting the form.

Bridge: Uniting Academic Innovation Leaders

Cutting-edge tools

Benefits for partner institutions

Directors

From Discovery to Impact:The Science Behind Accelerating Global Innovation

Bridge is guided by a Founder's Committee of five distinguished institutional leaders

The Bridge Innovation Network‍

Connect with the Future of Science Innovation

From Discovery to Impact:
The Science Behind Accelerating Global Innovation

The Bridge Innovation Network
‍